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Basically, I don't understand the concept. I do understand basic aliases, but I didn't know that you could put a "x." or a "y." in front of a column name (what is this syntax even called?). Does the x.date and y.date refer to the exact same row?

If anyone would mind giving an explanation of this, I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance--

I thought I was simply changing the order of the commands (to make more sense to me) but now I realize that I broke it. I didn't realize that it wasn't working because the error was supressed and the function was returning a default value.

I appreciate all the help you already gave, but could you tell me how the code above works? thanks again-

BTW: I'm really sorry about wasting your time with the first code I posted.